Several companies are trying to build the best AI coding tool in the market. While GitHub Copilot and Anysphere’s Cursor tried to steal the spotlight in the initial days, Microsoft’s Visual Code Studio (VS Code) took the lead again in 2024.
VS Code has remained a polarising tool in the developer community. While some revere and critique it, the tool has never been ignored. No matter how many competing platforms emerge, VS Code remains the center of the debate, embodying both power and complexity. Cursor is also a fork of VS Code, but with some added AI sprinkles.
“Not sure if Microsoft can truly comprehend the true footprint of VSCode,” said Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google. Even though many developers uninstalled VS Code and moved to using Cursor and hundreds of other forks of VS Code, they soon realised that a good coder can never be replaced, even if they are content with VS Code.
“All the best programmers I know just code and don’t care about IDE (Integrated Development Environment),” said a developer on X, agreeing with the sentiment of another seasoned developer.
Why Not Cursor?
There are developers who don’t prefer VS Code’s simple coding environment and find it overwhelming. Posting on X, Manish Baghel, a developer, noted that while VS Code has too many options, he finds VIM, an open-source text editor and terminal, as a perfect tool. Baghel preferred its minimalistic combination over VS Code’s feature-rich environment.
While Cursor garnered the attention of the developer community, it has not been able to create an on-ground impact, which would happen if it could replace the real users of VS Code within companies. However, it seems unlikely. While privacy remains a main concern overall, in a country like India, the price of such AI coding tools remains a determining factor.
That said, reports indicate that using AI tools for learning and coding actually makes one lazy.
With both VS Code and GitHub Copilot being part of Microsoft’s ecosystem, the unavailability of a choice of tools is among the reasons for not shifting away from it.
For instance, GitHub recently set a new standard in the coding arena with its multi-model lineup of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o1-mini and o1-preview. It brought unmatched versatility and developer choice across VS Code, Xcode, and beyond, positioning itself as the ultimate toolkit for today’s code-generation needs.
However, with the right extensions, VS Code can make Cursor look like a tool with unnecessary functionalities.
VS Code is All You Need
It is indisputable that the barrier to entry for becoming a developer has dropped significantly ever since AI was introduced in coding. People are able to build software for their personal use and even build apps in mere hours. However, this does not eliminate the fact that it is currently only limited to just creating such apps and low-level software solutions. The hiring for such roles has dimmed.
Having tools such as Cursor, Melty, Codeium, Pearl, Zed, and others is only good enough if a developer actually knows how the code works. This is where VS Code shines. It has the simplicity of a normal IDE, along with the capabilities of Neovim and IntelliSense, making it an ideal hybrid tool choice.
Given the massive footprint of VS Code, it has been proven that it is impossible to uninstall it. “Even if Cursor survives through the next year, I would go with VS Code just to have something standard and mainstream to compare it to,” said a user.
With IDEs, developers have a standardised environment with a defined codebase for meeting specific requirements. While an automated code generation platform cannot control the code consistency, the future of software development is likely to see AI-integrated IDEs becoming the norm. This would be helpful in analysing code in real-time and automatically correcting them.
Though the future of IDEs definitely looks like a combination of generative AI and traditional coding, VS Code still stands still.
Also, if the future success of IDEs is not dependent on AI, then the only alternative to VS Code is JetBrains. But that is a story for another time.
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